Following Intel and its partners working extensively on solid-state storage technology, IBM's research staff at the IBM Hursley development lab in England and the Almaden Research Center in California, USA, have demonstrated performance results that outperform the world's fastest disk storage solution by more than 250%, according to the company.

Titled Project Quicksilver, an effort in which IBM coupled solid-state drives with its storage virtualization technology to achieve a sustained data transfer rate of more than 1 million input/output per second (IOPS), with a response time of less than one millisecond in a 4.1-terabyte rack of SSD storage. SSDs are being supplied by Fusion-IO.

"It's feasible that we could get it commercialized within 12 months," said Charlie Andrews, director of product marketing for IBM systems storage. "Right now we have a screaming (fast) system, but there's more work to be done in terms of long-term reliability and integration with systems applications. We don't want to get distracted with 'push the hardware.' We want to focus on the solution piece first," he added.Source: cnet

This thing does not sit on a IDE/SATA interface... which is too slow! It goes directly on the PCIe bus. It will need drivers.

iram was not designed for storing data. It was designed as a "cache". Its MAX of 8GB was not for data, but for pagefiles, etc. Yes, you could put an OS on it... but unlike the IBM solution, it was not designed for holding massive databases and transactional I/O.

With one or more of these cards replacing a server farm... the power and space savings are incredible.